Exchange September 1, 2021 – March 30, 2022 Offsite

Waiting Upon speaks to a particular mode of waiting. It is not a suspenseful waiting, but that of potential. It knows something will happen, but precisely what will be determined by the conditions of possibility and what is brought to the communal table. Following a brief residency at A4 in November 2019 (exploring forms, conditions and architectures of gathering in the service of continuing and evoking embodied archives of place through rituals and practices) architect Sumayya Vally chose Waiting Upon as the title for her Course of Enquiry, speaking to the programme’s interest in process as form. Holding space for routine conversation and creative exchange twice a month, Waiting Upon enables the suspension of the pace of usual work, allowing the practitioner and her interlocutors to step into an informal space demarcated for relational and reciprocal wandering and wondering. Some questions asked include, “What kind of engine is a gallery or institution to a project?” and “What is its utility?” coupled with a search for autonomous (self-possessed, self-correcting) structures and objects. Vally’s iteration of COE will conclude with a public presentation at A4 in 2022, conceived of as an “assembly of critical friends”; where new work by the integrated practitioner will be presented in the company of other works as part of a constellation of meaningful associations that emerge from, and reflect on, a process of nascent ideation and things taking shape.